Giorgio de ChiricoThe Uncertainty of the Poet

Transcript

This strange and mysterious oil painting
measures 106 x 94 cm. At first the scene seems naturalistic,
but almost immediately the curious collection of elements within
it and the exaggerated viewpoints generate a feeling of unease. The
painting shows a city square entirely empty of people. In
the foreground on the left is a marble statue of a female torso
and lying next to it on the right are several bunches of ripe
bananas still attached to a large branch. The torso is basically
seen from the side, although it is twisting towards us at the
waist, showing more of the chest and suggesting that the original
pose might have been one of action. It has no arms below the
upper bicep, no legs below the top of the thigh and no head.
The statue and the bananas appear to be sitting on a gigantic
plinth that fills the bottom half the painting and most of the
square. On the right of the painting, cast in shadow,
is a colonnade running at a sharp angle away
from the viewer towards the centre of the picture. It has three
arches, and the recesses beyond them darken dramatically to
pitch black.

A quarter of the way down from the top of the painting
is a brick wall, running horizontally across
the canvas and forming a rigid horizon line. Visible just behind
the wall, a steam train travels from right to left. Seen in
silhouette against what appears to be an evening sky, the train
ends just short of the left hand edge of the painting. Emerging
from its chimney is a long plume of white smoke drifting above
the roofs of its carriages.

De Chirico was only twenty-five when he painted The Uncertainty
of the Poet. He had arrived in Paris the year before
having spent much of the previous six years travelling. He
was born in Athens but left Greece with his mother and brother
when he was seventeen after his father died. In the
intervening years, De Chirico had travelled to Venice, Florence,
Turin and Milan and studied art for three years in Munich. During
this time he developed a style that came to be known as Metaphysical
painting. Metaphysics in Christian theology means the
world after death, but for De Chirico it meant the otherworldly,
the imagined and the enigmatic.

He said that, "one
must picture everything in the world as an enigma…To
live in the world as if in an immense museum
of strangeness, full of curious many-coloured
toys which change their appearance, which like
little children we sometimes break to see how
they are made on the inside."

Unlike the Italian Futurists
who despised the art of the past and strove to
create works of art that celebrated modernity and speed, De
Chirico’s Metaphysical paintings feel eerily
still and are filled with references to Europe’s classical
past such as ancient Greek statuary and Renaissance architecture. His
style was the product of the unique combination of influences
he had acquired during his travels as a young man. In Munich,
he was fascinated by the Symbolist artists Max Klinger and Arnold
Bocklin whose paintings featured strange narratives and mythical
creatures. He was also exposed to the philosopher Nietzsche,
who inspired his belief in the possibility of a reality parallel
to one’s own everyday experience. His brief stay
in Turin also had a lasting impact on his art. Its piazzas,
colonnades and statues became the central motifs of his Metaphysical
paintings. So when De Chirico finally arrived in Paris in 1912,
his style was already fully formed, though it was the French
critic Apollinaire who first applied the term ‘Metaphysical’ to
his work.

Apollinaire was an early supporter of
his work, appreciating the mysterious dream-like
atmosphere the paintings evoked. Through Apollinaire, De Chirico
found a dealer and met leading avant-garde artists such as Picasso. But both as a painter and as
a man, he preferred to keep himself to himself. During
World War I he went back to Italy and on his return to Paris
in 1924 he had radically changed his approach to painting, rejecting
his Metaphysical works. However, those pre-war paintings
now attracted the attention of the Surrealists who saw in them
strong connections with their own interest in the unconscious
mind and Freud’s analysis of dreams. The Surrealist’s
leader Andre Breton saw De Chirico as a pre-cursor to the Surrealist
movement and though the group never embraced his post-war style,
De Chirico’s art was to have a huge influence on the work
of Max Ernst, Salvador Dali and Magritte.

The Uncertainty of the Poet is
framed on two sides by architecture. On the right of the painting is a colonnade
made up of three immensely tall arches decreasing in height
as they stretch into the distance. Only the furthest arch
can be seen in its entirety since the others
are cut off prematurely by the top of the painting.
The width of arch nearest us is also interrupted
by the vertical edge of the canvas, giving the
sense that the colonnade continues beyond the painting behind
us.

Particularly in Southern Europe, colonnades usually provide
a cool and sheltered walkway around the edge
of a building. On closer inspection however,
de Chirico’s
colonnade seems less than typical. As we look
at its most distant point it appears that it has no building
above it. And instead of being a light, airy construction, the
interior is completely dark. The external surface of the colonnade
is also in dark shadow, so the overall impression is of a rather
threatening, sinister piece of architecture.

Through the gloom,
we can see that the stonework is smooth as if
it has been plastered and the columns are not
rounded but square. De Chirico has emphasised the geometry
of the architecture by drawing sharp black outlines along the
edges of each facet of the colonnade, even demarcating the angle
along which the columns meet the ground as if it were a wall
meeting a floor. This gives the colonnade an unnatural
and aggressive perspectival accuracy.

If the colonnade forms
a wall along the right of the painting, then
the brick wall forms one at the back. Like the colonnade, De
Chirico has drawn a bold black line along the bottom of the
wall marking the point at which it meets the ground. These
emphatic black lines almost seem like an attempt
to confine us to the piazza, preventing us from escaping back
to our own reality. The effect is both claustrophobic
and alienating. As
viewers, we seem to be utterly alone in what
should be a crowded public space. The emptiness and feeling
of silence in this painting is so intense that
one doubts whether there are even people on the speeding train
beyond the wall.

Despite the fact that the wall is in the far
distance, De Chirico has marked each red brick
individually in its surrounding dark cement. For each brick to be visible at this distance
they would have to be enormous. As such, these unrealistically
sized bricks also play with our sense scale. It becomes impossible
to judge the size of the wall in relation to the train, as they
seem to be operating in different dimensions altogether. If
the bricks are a standard size, then the steam engine has been
miniaturised. Alternatively, if the train is to scale
the bricks have to be monumental.

Soon, other strange features become noticeable along the line
of the wall. For instance, towards its right hand end
is what appears to be a plume of white smoke rising from some
hidden location. We know the train has not produced it, because
the smoke from the train’s chimney has been shaped into
a fat horizontal cloud by its forward motion.
This cloud of smoke on the other hand, appears
to rise from its unknown source in an undisturbed vertical column,
indicating that the air is still and windless and adding to
our sense of claustrophobia.

To the left of the smoke De Chirico
provides another suggestion of an existence beyond
the piazza, as partially obscured by the wall is what appears
to be the mast and rigging of a sailing boat.

For De Chirico, trains were a metaphor for the journey into
the unconscious mind. It is also likely that they held
a personal significance, since his father was
a railway engineer. However,
in this work neither train nor boat seems to
offer an escape from the stifling and eerie world
of the painting.

The
harsh geometry of the wall and the colonnade
is enhanced by the stone plinth beneath the statue
and the bananas. Plinths
are flat bases upon which a sculpture sits and
as such, are usually slightly larger that the
base area of the sculpture. Not
only is this plinth enormous, it also has a very
strange shape, unrelated to the objects its supports. It
fills the bottom half of the painting, emerging
from the left of the picture and stopping just
short of the colonnade on the right hand side.
In the bottom right hand corner of the painting
we can also glimpse the near edge of the plinth.

Its
surface is smooth and a murky grey-green in colour,
giving it the appearance of slate. The paint has been
applied quite thinly, so in places the lower
layer of mustard yellow shows through, while across the
surface of the plinth individual brush strokes
are visible in the paint. The near edge of the plinth reveals
that its probably several centimetres thick. This solidity combined
with the smooth surface, makes the plinth resemble the lid of
a tomb.

A dark, crisp shadow cuts across the top right hand corner
of the plinth, part of a larger shadow thrown
by the colonnade across most of the piazza. Its presence
is heavy and emphatic, but its shape it does
not seem to correspond with the shape of the
colonnade.

The only part of the piazza not cast in shadow is
a chevron shaped patch of ground painted bright
mustard yellow. Compared to the darkness of the shadowed building,
the stone plinth, the red brick wall and the black steam train,
this patch of yellow appears very vivid and implies that the
sunlight is strong and hot. This sense of Mediterranean heat
is reinforced by the deep blue sky above the train that runs
from dark azure blue at the top of the painting to a more golden
hue as it disappears behind the wall.

The yellow paint describing this sunny part of the piazza had
been laid on the canvas smoothly, without any
attempt at describing texture. Since other textures in the painting seem naturalistic,
the viewer’s instinct is to read this yellow surface as
sand. However, this is a curious surface for a public
square and more reminiscent of a bullring.

The
bright yellow in the piazza is repeated in the
large pile of bananas lying in the foreground. Twenty-three bananas
hang from the branch in an enormous bunch, the shape of which
echoes the narrowing V-shape of the plinth on which they sit. Like
the architecture, the facets of the bananas have been emphasised
so that they look chiselled rather than soft. We can see
that the fruit is ripe, as lines of brown discolouration appear
along their edges and in patches across the yellow skin. In
places the underside of the bananas reflect the green-grey colour
of the plinth. This gives some of them the curious impression
of being both ripe and unripe at the same time. Slightly
incongruously, one banana lies separate from the bunch in the
top right corner of the plinth.

The scale of all
of the elements in the painting is ambiguous,
each object refusing to act as a reliable guide
to the size of any other. If we use the bananas as our standard,
the statue appears to be somewhat less than lifesize. But equally,
we might choose the statue itself as a gauge, in which case
De Chirico is presenting us with an oversize bunch of bananas.

The
sculpted female torso is positioned so that her
hips face slightly away from us and towards the colonnade. Her body
is then twisted sharply towards us at the waist as if she were
trying to look over her right shoulder at the ground behind
her. This means that we can see both her buttocks, as
well as her breasts in three quarter profile
which, although unnatural, is dramatic in this
otherwise actionless scene.

Despite its lack of head and
limbs, the statue is as close as we come to a human
presence in the picture. De Chirico enjoyed the way sculpture
could capture in cold, lifeless stone a sense of the life and
energy of its subjects, long after the subject itself had passed
on. In other paintings from this period his city squares include
the statue of Ariadne, who in Greek mythology helped
Theseus escape from the labyrinth and the Minotaur.

However,
if this is Ariadne, her dismembered body offers
little hope of escape from this scene. Her lifeless
permanence however, does draw our attention to the gradual decay
of the bananas next to her, the only objects in the piazza which
do not seem immune to the passing of time.

Although the surface
of the marble is smooth, De Chirico has used
hatched lines to describe the shadows around the curves of the
torso. These dark, forceful lines are consistent with De Chirico’s mark-making elsewhere in painting, but here
they also seem to mimic the impressions left by a sculptor’s
chisel.

The shadow cast by the bananas and the statue has only a passing
relationship with the forms that create it. Like the shadow
of the colonnade, it is a severe geometric shape, creating a
zigzag beneath the fruit and the sculpture. By depicting
the shadow at all, De Chirico appears to be adhering
some sense of naturalism. But by depicting it
in this way, oddly unrelated to the objects above
it, he shatters the illusion in the same gesture.